Subtleties
by TheRockNRollBeauty
Summary: There is a time when all those toxic feelings, all those silences and rejections that have been slowly building up inside you spill out all at once. And then all you need is a shot of alcohol and a gun. One sided Style, character death, and general angst.


Oh dear. So this is my first South Park fanfic, huh? Well, I am relatively proud of it, which is nice. Anyway, I decided to do a bloody, angsty, deathy Style oneshot. I don't know if Stan is uber out of character or what, I kind of got out of control and made him kind of insane. And kyle...poor kyle. If you're a fan of them being happy and sane and alive, then I suggest you don't read this! But if you're a fucking sadist like me who somehow writes about her favorite characters suffering, then go ahead!

**Subtleties that Make Mass Murderers out of Otherwise Decent Human Beings**

It was an accident.

I swear to God. I told Jesus myself that I didn't mean to.

I wasn't a murderer. How could I be a murderer?

It was an accident.

It happened the weekend my parents were away. They were down in Denver, or Boulder, or somewhere for-for some kind of wedding or second honeymoon or family reunion or something-

There isn't much I remember of that weekend.

Better teens than me would have taken full advantage of an empty house, parents hundreds of miles away, and an unlocked liquor cabinet.

_Were my parents fucking retarded? There really wasn't much evidence in their defense._

I didn't want the big party that weekend though. I didn't want to spend my Sunday cleaning vomit and cum off the ceiling.

All I wanted was to have my super best friend over to play some violent video games and ravage my Dad's beer stash.

By the sixth hour of Call of Duty we were both consumed in the haze of the alcohol and the adrenaline of the simulated violence. I flicked on my phone with a free hand. It was 1:30, and the beer was starting to wear away.

I paused the game. He looked up at my from his slouched position on the floor.

"What the hell, dude."

I tossed my controller aside and got up.

"Dad's got some whiskey, man."

He set down his controller and shifted onto the couch, giving me a thumbs up.

"Good. This beer tastes like cold pee anyway."

_Drinking pee was definitely not one of his favorite things to do. _I smirked a little to myself.

The linoleum of the kitchen was way brighter than I remembered. I mumbled and started to fumble with the cabinet where Dad stashed all his strongest liquors. I grabbed a bottle of mellow colored liquid and retreated back to the living room.

He was slumped across the arm of my couch, quietly laughing to himself. I wrenched off the top of the bottle and set it down on the side table.

"What the fuck are you doing?"

He turned to look at me, and in his hand I could see a square of light. At this time I realized my phone was missing from its place on the couch.

"Dude, fuck, give me that!" I threw my self on the couch and grabbed his arm, struggling to retrieve my phone from his drunken fingers. Finally, I shoved my elbow into his neck and pried my phone away. I cringed as I saw the little animated message fly across my screen. I turned the phone off and pressed my palm into my forehead.

"Who the fuck did you text?"

"Wendy. I told 'er you were a fag." He burst out laughing. I groaned and tossed the phone away.

_God. He could be a stupid bitch sometimes._

Call of Duty became increasingly difficult to play as the liquor settled in, so I mashed the Xbox's power button and flipped the TV on. Shelley must have been watching Teen Bitch or that Jersey thing or something, because MTV flicked on to the screen.

"Oh, fuck dude," He rolled his eyes, "Not Jackass."

"Don't be such a bitch," I laughed, "It can be funny."

Predictably, he was enthralled after a few moments. Retarded testosterone is pretty appealing when you're drunk.

I don't remember exactly what the stunt was or why we were so inspired by it. By some drunken stroke of genius, we thought ourselves to be perfectly capable of tackling something potentially fatal. I remember vaguely saying I wanted to have Steve O's babies. The next thing I knew, I was fumbling through the drawer of my dad's room, looking for his gun.

I knew the man had a gun, not matter how hard he tried to hide it. He had taught me how to shoot it once. That was one of my earliest memories: Dad taking me out into the backyard and teaching me how to shoot. I guess it was kind of a morbid first memory to have, and I hated handling the weapon in general. But it did come in handy sometimes. I borrowed it this one time when I was like eight. I don't remember why. Something to do with 9/11.

Downstairs I took another shot of liquid courage, before grabbing my best friend by the arm and dragging him outside. Despite being equally as hammered as me, he was-hesitant.

"Dude…dude. No fucking way."

"C'mon man. It'll be sick."

I held out an empty beer can to him. He looked at me apprehensively.

"Dude…no. You're not going to shoot that fucking thing off my head."

"Dude. C'mon. Stop being such a fag."

"You're a fag," he slurred.

"So we're both fags. We should have drunken buttsex." I wasn't sure at that point if I meant any part of that statement.

He grabbed the beer can from my hand with a pissy look on his face. He stumbled forward and grabbed onto my shirt, waving a finger in my face.

"All right" he mumbled "But you better not fucking miss, a'ight?"

"Dude," I gently pried his fingers from my shirt "Fucking seriously? No one says 'a'ight' anymore."

He flipped me off, but I laughed and put an arm around him, perhaps superfluously.

"Hey man, don't worry. I'll take care of you." I smiled briefly brushing my face against a mess of red hair. Booze had made me bolder, but I must have crossed some kind of "no homo" line, because he pulled away from my arm and stumbled back. I felt a familiar pang in my chest.

_The kid was fucking clueless, I swear. _

He was attempting to balance the empty can in his nest of ginger hair, which would have been quite a feat sober. Finally, more or less, the can sat lopsidedly and stayed there, despite his drunken swaying.

I was loading carefully with a bizarre sense of purpose. Dad had taught me how to fire this same gun when I was six.

He was in front of me, standing in the snow, in my backyard, arms out to his sides to help keep his balance. He looked at me nervously.

"Dude? You all right?"

"Fine," I mumbled.

He looked to the gun as I raised it up in front of me.

"Dude, are you sure you want to do this?"

I gave him a half humored laugh. "Don't be such a fucking pussy, man. Just think of how fucking awesome it's going to be. If you don't I'll tell Cartman you're a little Jew bitch."

That sealed it. I saw the flicker of annoyance pass in his eyes before he shut them.

"All right man. Do it."

I raised the gun up higher and tried to straighten my aim. My head hurt, my eyesight was fuzzy. I blinked several tries, trying to clear myself of the stupor.

As I focused on the can balanced on my best friend's head though, some painful feeling snaked up through my stomach and grabbed onto my heart.

Even after all this time I still don't know why it happened. Most people chalked it up to a drunken accident. Two teenagers boys mixed with a couple shots of whiskey and a gun. It was a perfect storm for disaster.

But the nagging voice at the back of my head has always told me that it wasn't the case. That it was something more. That everything was "something more."

_All the vague little hints that I had been dropping over the years, the little tastes of affection-_

_Maybe too subtle? But I was afraid, so fucking afraid-_

_I never wanted that vocal rejection, that affirmation of my worst fears-_

_But he could have noticed. He could have fucking noticed. Wasn't he supposed to be the smart one? _

I was drunk, but I could have shot above the can. I _know _ I could have. I could have shot to the side of him. Hell, I could have even hit him in the shoulder, or the leg, or the balls or something. But I didn't.

I could even admit that it was an accident if I had shot him in the head. If by some drunken sleight of hand I had slightly lowered my aim. That could have been an honest mistake.

If he hadn't been so fucking clueless about everything about me then it could have been an honest mistake.

_It was all his fucking fault._

The silent rejections that had built up the anger and bile in my stomach started to churn. Toxic butterflies were fluttering up into my throat. I felt my inside twisting and burning as I held the gun out in front of me. The stench from my twisting digestive contents came up through my nose and into the clear, wet air.

It made me feel sick. It made me feel sick and angry.

Jesus. I wanted these fucking feelings purged from my body so bad.

In one of those final seconds something within my mind made a decision. Some ingrained emotion sharpened by the intoxicating hate of the beer forced my hand.

I dropped my arm down in the same second that I fired. I didn't hear the shot.

His body jerked, in an unnatural way I'd never seen a person move before. The expression on his face was stupid, so dazed and confused and caught in the stupor, and in that moment I felt perfectly clear and free of any intoxicated emotion: all I felt was the purity of vindication.

He flew off his feet and landed with a thud in the snow. I dropped the gun as he fell. The twisting feelings in my stomach burned away.

If things had ended-if his life had ended right then and there, I would've probably been all right.

Just my luck, though. He didn't die right away.

Soon that comforting, stupid look had disappeared from his face, replaced with a screwed up expression of pain and shock and fear.

I felt my brain behaving independently from my body. My head didn't register any thoughts of fear or worry, but my body rushed forward and collapsed in the white beside my friend's shuddering form.

The unscathed beer can lay several feet away.

He was curled up on his side, his skinny, shivering legs pulled up to his chest. One of his hands was clasped tight around his middle, where his thin gray T-shirt had grown wet and red.

He was making choking, sobbing noises, as he tried to vocalize his thoughts: the undeniably angry and confused and betrayed thoughts that clouded his dying brain.

Instead, a red froth bubbled over his lips and onto the snow.

The hand that wasn't pressed on his stomach shakily left his side and reached up and out towards me. His eyes moved up to meet mine. The dull green eyes that held such fascination for me were pleading and terrified.

_Terrified of me? He should be. Why the hell did he want to grab my hand? Didn't I just shoot him? Reaching for my hand was probably just some kind of reflex. Just some kind of misfire of synapses._

But I already knew that I wasn't going to run for help. The least I could do was give him my hand.

I intertwined my clean fingers with his freezing, bloodstained ones.

_Did he even know what was happening? Was he still so fucking plastered that he didn't even know he was dying? _

He clutched my hand tighter and tighter. I cringed. Fuck. Hadn't he hurt me enough already?

I took solace from the pitiful and painful sight to look up at the sky. The moon was a gaping, eyelike wound in the black, round and perfect. I wanted to check if the wound I had made was as perfect as I knew it was penetrating. A sharp, painful squeeze on my hand made me look down. Shit. When would he stop fucking hurting me?

He wasn't even looking at me either, his eyes were squeezed shut. He sobbed out from gritted and pinking teeth as tears began to collect in the creases of his eyes.

_What the fuck was he crying about? His wounds would turn to dust and disappear. Mine would stick around._

Suddenly his body tensed, he clutched at his stomach and raggedly breathed in, and vomited a stream of sticky dark blood onto the snow. I allowed him to regain control of his breathing and crush my hand under his death grip. Besides, I enjoyed the contrast of the white and the red. Maybe too much.

_Jesus. I felt like Cartman. Was I this much of a sicko? Fucking A. _

I reached forward with my free hand and placed my thumb on the corner of his mouth. I felt the sticky red beneath my finger. I pushed down hard on the side of his mouth as I smeared the blood down his jawline.

_Since when had I been like this? When did I become such a fucking sadist?_

He inhaled sharply from my less than gentle touch and sucked in some of the blood around his mouth. He gagged for a moment, and I felt myself wondering how he was going to die: from the gunshot wound, or from choking on his own blood.

_Was I really thinking about this? Wasn't he my best friend? Didn't I just shoot him in the fucking stomach?_

Even drunks feel remorse. I couldn't blame these feelings on the booze. No, this was me. This sick fascination with my dying best friend was all me.

My heart had ravaged itself into pieces, ripped into two different camps. And for the first time, ever since this whole ordeal began, I let the grieving, normal side of me win. I gripped his hand in both of mine and held it to my chest. I let tears slid down my face and onto his frozen skin.

But I confirmed to myself that I was crying because he was dying, and not because I had shot him.

I could cry. But I couldn't call for help. I didn't want to call for help. I wouldn't be able to explain myself and what I'd done.

I slid my hand under his neck and pulled him up into me. He let out a weak cry of pain, but I ignored it. He damn better let me be selfish in this.

I briefly felt his hands push up against me, in the same way I had felt hundreds of times, but his protestations were weak and soon faltered against my chest.

I wound my fingers through his red strands of hair. I breathed in deeply the smell of the cool frigid air, delightfully tinged with the spicy hint of gunpowder and the metallic stench of blood.

It was soothing, to sit there in the dark of my backyard and hold him close and count his shortening breaths, to feel the warm blood rise up through his mouth and spill onto the side of my neck. I remember closing my eyes. I remember his last, shuddering breath.

It took a long time for his brain to die. It was a long time before his last thought crackled through his alcohol addled head.

And the only thought he could have possibly had was:

_Why?  
_

Why?

Maybe I was drunk.

Maybe I hated him.

Maybe I loved him.

Maybe all that subtleties and anger had built up and forced its way out of my throat and into my brain.

Maybe it was just an accident.


End file.
